Artsy -With some 200 works to her name, Frida Kahlo was not a prolific painter. But she was certainly a prolific lover: Her list of romances stretched across decades, continents, and sexes. She was said to have been intimately involved with, among others, Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky, dancer Josephine Baker, and photographer Nickolas Muray. However, it was her obsessive, abiding relationship with fellow painter Diego Rivera—for whom she’d harbored a passionate crush since she laid eyes on him at age 15—that affected Kahlo most powerfully.

Many of her canvases allude to the volatile but essential connection between the two hotheaded artists, who married in 1929, divorced some 10 years later, and remarried soon after. In one especially telling self-portrait, Diego on my mind (Self-portrait as Tehuana) (1943), Kahlo tattoos a small likeness of Rivera smack in the middle of her forehead. But it’s her bewitchingly crafted love letters that make it clear how deeply she was affected by her relationship with the Mexican muralist. – read more